Glorious noise

THERE'S no doubt it's had a bad press. For most of us, noise is what goes on next door when you're trying to sleep. It's that horrible hiss and crackle when an old recording ends or when you try to tune your short-wave radio into the BBC World Service when you're in the Brazilian jungle.

But within that seemingly meaningless barrage of uncontrolled and usually disruptive rapid-fire shocks lies something far more interesting. If those shocks arrive in just the right sequence, interesting things happen. Without noise, ice would never grow on a lake in winter, nor would chemical reactions happen; noise drives our muscles to contract when they should and it helps our cells to pump crucial materials though their membranes. Life itself wouldn't exist without that messy stuff called noise.

But how does noise do its work? And if we understand it better, can we harness its power? ...

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